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Tweet @rushmoreacademy or comment on this post with the pseudonym that you would use to check-in to the Grand Budapest Hotel. One winner (U.S. residents only), the most ingenious pseudonym as determined by the Rushmore Academy editors, will receive a Grand Budapest Hotel prize pack courtesy of ABKCO Music and Fox Searchlight:

Copy of the soundtrack signed by Wes Anderson

Mini film poster

Monthly tear-away calendar

Society of the Crossed-keys pin

Journal

The Wes Anderson Collection book

Be sure to tag the #grandbudapesthotel, @ABKCO, @foxsearchlight in your tweets! Buy ABKCO’s Grand Budapest Hotel soundtrack here. Deadline for submissions is Friday, 4 April 2014 at 11:59 pm U.S. Eastern time. Contributors to rushmoreacademy.com are not eligible for this prize.

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If you’ve ever enjoyed Wes Anderson’s keen sense of pairing just the right song with justthe right scene, you have Randall Poster to thank. NPR has a wonderful interview with Poster that focuses on his work with Wes. Poster has worked on all of Wes’s films post-Bottle Rocket, after meeting through a mutual friend.

While walking around a farmer’s market, Anderson told Poster about a piece of music that he wanted to use for Bottle Rocket but couldn’t because of a rights issue.

“I was so smitten with the film that I basically promised to get any piece of music that he ever wanted to use in a movie,” Poster says. “And that kicked us off.”

Randall Poster’s interview with NPR is a real gem and offers a very different perspective of working on an Anderson film. To learn even more about Poster’s work, a 2007 interview with the Guardian has some great blurbs about working on WA films and others.

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We were deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. In addition to his massive musical legacy, he was also a daring director and founded Oscilloscope Laboratories, which in our estimation is bar none the best independent film distributor in the world. Yauch was also a passionate movie lover, and he was asked by Criterion to put together a list of his top ten favorite Criterion titles. His list is eclectic and knowledgeable, and it includes two Wes Anderson titles. You can see the list and read his funny, creative reasons (starting with #10 and going up) here.

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The first details of the Moonrise Kingdom soundtrack have been released by ABCKO Records, the company that also released the soundtracks to The Darjeeling Limited and Fantastic Mr. Fox. The soundtrack, which is due to be released on May 22, will feature Françoise Hardy, Hank Williams, Alexandre Desplat, music performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and classical composer Benjamin Britten, whose majestic choral opera “Noye’s Fluddes,” evidently “ignites the film’s young lovers.” No stranger to Wes Anderson films, Marc Mothersbaugh also contributes a track.

The soundtrack is available for pre-order on Amazon, but does not yet have a soundtrack listing.

Françoise Hardy’s Le Temps de l’Amour was featured in the first trailer for Moonrise Kingdom, so no surprises there. The mix of the French Yé-Yé with American country and classical compositions would be strange in anyone else’s film, but it seems quintessentially Wes.

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Wes Anderson favorite Mark Mothersbaugh recently sat down for an interview with Splitsider to talk about his time spent on Rugrats, his musical inspirations, and his song-writing process.

He also touched on the process of working with Wes:

“It was interesting,” Mothersbaugh continued. “Rarely are you involved that early in a project unless it’s a stage show, like a musical or something.”

The only other director that took this approach with Mothersbaugh, according to the composer, was Wes Anderson. “He sat in the studio with me and would be writing the script. And he’d say, ‘You know, I’m thinking about putting a composer on the boat with everybody. What kind of equipment would he be using? What kind of keyboards and recording equipment would he be using?’”

Noting that such a multi-disciplinary and collaborative way of working has only happened to him “a few times,” Mothersbaugh confessed that normally “you’re almost an after-thought on a lot of films. It’s the nature of the beast.”

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Seu Jorge recently stopped by Amoeba Records in Hollywood to participate in their “What’s in My Bag?” series. He has some cool picks. You may remember the series previously featured Jason Schwartzman. Jorge’s most recent album is Músicas para Churrasco, Vol. 1, and he’s currently the coolest man alive.